Digital media data, such as audio and video and still images, are commonly encoded into bitstreams that are transmitted or stored in data files, where the encoded bitstreams conform to established standards. An example of such a standard is a format called ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2, also called and ITU-T H.265, or HEVC or H.265. Herein, a bitstream that is encoded in accordance with this standard is called an HEVC-compliant bitstream.
Two operations, sample adaptive offset and deblocking, are performed on intermediate image data while decoding an image from an HEVC-compliant bitstream. More particularly, these operations process each block of the intermediate image data according to parameters for that block, which are stored in the encoded bitstream.